DreamFleet/Flight1 Piper Archer

By Andrew Herd (31 May 2002)

he Archer is a plane with a pedigree - it has its roots in the PA-28-150 and 160 Cherokees introduced way back in '61 as replacements for the Tri-Pacer and Colt. The big design advance was that the new PA-28s had a low wing and were all metal. These planes are famously tough and many of the originals are still flying around, while their lesser brethren have been long gone to the scrap yard. There aren't any "lifed" components in the hulls, so theoretically it should be possible to keep a PA-28 flying forever, unlike its cousin the Tomahawk.

The most powerful engine in the original series was a 160 horse unit, but demand was such that it wasn't very long Piper were offering a flat six 0-540 which provided 235 horsepower; and from then on, a bewildering number of variants emerged before the Cherokee tag was dropped in favor of the name Archer.

FlightOne have simulated an Archer II (the current model is the Archer III, introduced in 1994). It can, without any shadow of a doubt, be described as a classic - but the thing that makes this sim of more than usual interest at FlightSim.Com is that the default livery that installs with the plane isn't any old Archer, it is Nels Anderson's very own Archer, the one that's been seen in FlightSim.Com logos for years. This particular plane is powered by a Lycoming 0-360-A4 which cranks out 180 hp, which translates into 120 kias on a good day. The aircraft can carry four passengers and is cleared for basic aerobatics including lazy eights and chandelles, but most of the time it does what its designers intended and gets used for pleasure flying.

I must admit, it isn't very often that I get to review a sim of a friend's plane, but without wasting any more time, let's get onto the package. The Archer is available on CD or as a 20 Mb download from FlightOne Software. In addition to the sim itself, there are two optional PDFs; the orientation manual and the pilot information manual, which total a further 11 megs. The manuals are well presented and organised PDFs, running to 55 pages in the case of the orientation manual and 82 pages for the pilot information manual. The PIM is more or less a straight repro of the excellent manual that Piper supply with the original aircraft - I suggest at the very minimum that you read the orientation manual, because this explains many features of the package which will prove baffling without it.

Installation is very straightforward from the CD and only slightly more complicated if you have a download version, in which case you need to go on-line briefly to verify a "key" that FlightOne supply to verify purchase. This is, needless to say, an antipiracy scheme. In addition to the Archer itself, you will find a new program group on your start menu, which gives you access to "Config-o-Matic" which lets you fly the plane with different loads, and "Text-o-Matic", which will be familiar to all FlightOne 737 users, because this little gem allows third party designers to upload freeware liveries for the plane. Yep, no word of a lie, you can get additional liveries for the Archer for nothing - like the one in the screen shot above. Text-o-Matic first saw the light of day with the 737 and if it proves as popular with the Archer as it did for the Boeing, we can look forwards to dozens of free repaints. I thought Text-o-Matic was a very clever idea when I first saw it with the FlightOne 737 and I still do.

Onto the test. Shortly after the Archer was released there was the inevitable patch and I tested the sim with this applied. Overall my impressions have been of a reliable package that is reasonably realistic - and as one might expect from a DreamFleet designed plane, it has plenty of personality.

The visual model was developed in GMax, which is a first for DreamFleet - from what I hear the 737 will eventually get the same treatment. Needless to say, the plane offers every last innovation that GMax has to offer, in particular reflective textures. All the parts that should move, do and the animations are very neat, though if you look extremely closely, the main wheels appear to rotate slightly off center. I suspect this is due to slight malpositioning of the graphics on the wheels themselves. The wing looks a bit thin compared to the real thing. Lou Betti of DreamFleet tells me that this is intentional; when they tried making the wing the correct thickness it looked huge, possibly due to the way the FS display engine works. Anyway, a minor point. Less minor are the gaps around the flaps, which aren't there on a real Archer, believe me. This only shows up in certain views, but it is the kind of thing you keep noticing once you have seen it. By way of compensation, there are some neat details, luck dirt around the rivet heads (I doubt that Nels aircraft has ever been this clean, by the way), but some of the detailing around the engine cowling could be improved. On the whole, I've seen better visual models, although this is still the best GMax Archer around.

From spot view the interior is well done, although the bitmaps on the faces of the rear seat passengers are a little basic. At night the instrument panel lighting is visible from the exterior and the cockpit lights shine on the cowling and the wing roots, which is a nice touch. There is a full complement of strobes and nav lights and whatever.

The flight model is (allowing for my standard disclaimer that no FS plane is ever exactly like the real thing) perfectly acceptable. I didn't try every single performance point out, but speeds and climb rates were broadly correct and the Archer handled pretty much the way it should. If I was to mark it down anywhere it would be for the way the aircraft has a slight tendency to roll out of turns - I would pretty much bet that the flight modeller doesn't use a yoke and pedals, because this is the kind of thing you never notice with a joystick. OK, so in the scheme of things it doesn't add up to much, but it does mean that prolonged turns aren't as easy to keep balanced as they should, because you keep having to feed in more roll. To be fair, many, perhaps the majority of FS planes have the same problem, which is related to a variable called the dihedral angle - using the correct value always seems to produce this problem. The roll out makes it slightly tricky doing wing-low cross wind landings, but in practice it isn't too much of an issue. Finally, the nose wheel tends to drop pretty quickly after landing, but since few FS flight models ever seem to get this right, I won't be picky. Stalls are just like stalls in the real plane - unexceptional. Nice sim to fly.

If the visual model isn't quite as good as it might be, the cockpit is the stuff of dreams. DreamFleet's great strength is in their panel design and in the way their cockpits convey the "feel" of what it is like to be in a real plane - the Archer is no exception. I have to take my hat off to those guys, because they have done it again with this sim. Load this old lady up and you are right there in an Archer, no question about it. Of course, it is a cleaner, newer Archer than any of the ones I have ever been in, but I guess if you are simulating something well you might as well simulate a good one.

The first thing to appreciate about the Archer panel is that it uses a very different system of click spots to the ones found on the default FS planes. There are no less than seven different click areas, some of which are less intuitive than others, but if you fly this plane a lot (and you will) they aren't difficult to remember. For example, it is possible to open an enlarged radio stack by left or right clicking above the artificial horizon in the 2D cockpit; left or right clicking above the autopilot opens the trim gauges; while a right click on either of the fuel gauges pops up the tank selector. On real PA-28s the fuel selector is hidden away in the left footwell, just where you don't think of looking for it until the engine coughs on final. Yeah, really. Two friends of mine had exactly this experience recently and they have a lot of hours between them. You can pop up a yoke in 2D view, clicking on the glare shield gives you a landing view panel, with better forward visibility, and there is full night lighting.

There are two different types of click spot, those where the cursor is a hand with a plus sign within it and those where the hand lacks a plus sign. The difference is that when the hand has a plus, it means that the instrument can be adjusted with both left and right hand mouse clicks - if you fail to understand this, as I did to begin with, doing quite simple things like altering radio frequencies is virtually impossible. However, once you get the hang of it, the system works well and brings a deal of flexibility with it.

The avionics fit is about as extensive as I have ever seen in an Archer; just about the only way to improve on it would be to go totally crazy and stick in a Garmin GNS 430 and a multiple axis autopilot, but we are talking a $19.95 download here ($24.95 on CD) and those Garmins cost several thousand dollars, so I guess DreamFleet just couldn't do it for the price. What you do get are two nav radios, two comms radios plus an audio selector panel, an ADF, DME, a transponder and a single-axis autopilot. I wish I flew planes that were as well equipped as Nels'. Sigh.

Anyway. Once you get used to the click spots, the panel works well and there are some very neat touches. The first of these is that right clicking on the faces of the primary flight instruments will cover them up for partial panel practice. Digital displays are available on some of the gauges if you left click them and the altimeter can be toggled between inches of mercury and millibars using the same method. Where appropriate, the instruments have warning flags. A functional partial radio stack has been shoehorned into the 2D panel, but most users will want to pop up the full stack for more than frequency changes. Finally, the sim has been fitted with a GPS instead of the Loran unit of the original.

Given that conventional monitors don't allow display of a full panel, DreamFleet have done some clever stuff with rollovers and popups. I have already mentioned the fuel selector, but the vacuum pump gauge can be switched for the exhaust gas temp gauge by clicking on it, and the EGT gauge has an adjustable bug. The tach has an engine hours meter which sets its value in an ini file, so that if you fly this plane a lot, you will find yourself heading inexorably towards the next tear down. When you reach it, I suggest you send the sim back to Nels with a polite note - it is his aircraft after all.

The autopilot is a single axis Century 21, which means that you have to maintain altitude while the electrics fly the course. The Century has heading, nav, approach and back course modes, but if you should tire of having to keep a hand on the yoke, there is an option in Config-o-Matic to install the default MS Bendix-King AP instead, so you can fly in simulated style. Config-o-Matic also lets you decide how much of the photorealistic 2D interior views you want to display; users with slower systems may want to stick with the minimalist option, which loads the two panels as the only 2D components. Personally, if you can get away with it, I think it is a shame not to load the complete 2D interior and wing views because they are drop dead gorgeous and not to be missed. DreamFleet are in a class of their own where these sorts of views are concerned and if you want to see how good it gets, check out the view of the rear of the cabin here. Config-o-Matic can also be used to display "simicons" on the 2D panel so that you can pop up the auxiliary panels the way the default planes do it.

The VC is right up there with the best I have ever seen, with a clean, bright panel and sharp gauges. Far too many VCs are muddy and unfocussed, but this one bucks the trend and shows how it ought to be done. The only other VCs I have seen in this class are the ones on FSD planes. The screen shot shows the VC with the pilot's view tilted down and to the right, just in case you are wondering where the horizon has gone. DreamFleet's programmers have really gone to town here and there are some superb animations, not least the moving flap lever, the pedals and the levers. Just in case you haven't ever been in a PA-28, they all feature an industrial strength bar between the seats which controls the flaps - there is no need to look at some dinky little needle to work out where the flaps are, you just drop your hand on the bar - or, in the case of the sim, you look down in the VC and check where it is at. Incidentally, notice how unbalanced that turn is, huh? Having just flown in a 172 in which an old lady had got frightened and peed on the seat, I really must remember to keep that ball in the middle. If you look just to the right of the panel, just forward of the pillar, there is a small area of missing surface, but that is just about the only fault I could find; other than the fact that the fly-off brake handle doesn't move, but I guess DreamFleet had to stop somewhere.

The sound set is by none other than Aaron Swindle and it is very good. There are some excellent start up sounds and a suitably crackly wind down when you pull the mixture to stop the fan. I listened hard but couldn't detect any sign of sound cycling (where the samples are too short and you hear the same sound repeated frequently). The fuel pump sound in particular is a gas... er, OK, I won't try any more like that. There is pleny of volume and I had to turn my speakers down to avoid scaring the cat.

The developers claim that this is one of the most complex GA planes ever developed for FS and I don't have any problems believing them. The cockpit is a tour de force and it takes as long to get your head around it as it does some of the less complex airliners out there. It is noticeable that every time DreamFleet release a new cockpit it outclasses their previous release and at this rate we are going to see some awesome stuff before too long - not perhaps that we aren't doing so right now.

In summary? The users have already had their say and the Archer is walking off the shelves. Checking out the forums there have been few complaints since the release of the patch, which accords with my experience of testing the plane. The Archer outclasses the vast majority of the competition and many users have already set it up as the default aircraft in FS, which tells its own story. My only question is: how long will it stay at the top of the heap? Surfing the developer sites and looking at all the GA releases on the horizon, it looks like there is some serious competition out there - and it may even be another FlightOne/DreamFleet package that takes the prize. But whatever the future holds for us, the FlightOne Archer is a must have.

The scenery shown in the review is Don Alexander's excellent freeware Teesside (EGNV22.ZIP), coupled with Stephen Gordon's Teesside (CLVLND2.ZIP), which make an excellent combination.